Individuals, groups and organizations make decisions on a daily basis. Good decisions require an evaluation of pros and cons supporting and opposing a decision. The implementation of decisions is typically more successful when parties responsible for implementation are involved in the decision-making process early and can raise pros and cons as well. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to coordinate groups of people, truly understand their positions on issues and come to an optimal decision.
There are many tools which can provide information for decision making, such as search engines and wikis, and there are many tools for getting feedback, such as surveys or blogs, and there are even decision making analysis tools which help with a number of these issues. However, human beings do not always make decisions based on logic and these tools often do not help identify and distinguish emotional from logical reasoning.
There is a need for technologies which assist individuals to better understand their own positions on issues, and technologies that help them better explain those positions to others. There is also a need for innovative tools that help group or organization decision makers to better understand their constituents' preferences and reasons for those preferences.
Within any debate or topic analysis, people may attempt to bias decision-making by hiding information, presenting information in a biased way, etc. There is a need for innovative technologies which allow participants to have more confidence in decision-making processes by structuring how arguments are presented and vetted, and by openly showing changes which occur over time to neutral, supporting, and opposing arguments. All overarching assertions are considered by definition to be neutral arguments, because they are not sub-assertions below other assertions. Another example of a neutral argument would be a restatement of an overarching assertion or sub-assertion, placed as a sub-assertion below the assertion it is restating. Such a restatement might be done, for instance, to suggest a more clear way of stating the assertion.